Jeff Sessions

Jeff Sessions (24 December 1946-) was a United States senator from Alabama from 3 January 1997, serving alongside Richard Shelby. On 18 November 2016, President-elect Donald Trump nominated Sessions as his Attorney-General, despite Sessions' controversial reputation as a reported racist.

Alabama attorney
Jeff Sessions was born in Selma, Alabama on 24 December 1946, the son of a farm equipment dealership owner. Sessions earned his juris doctor from the University of Alabama School of Law in 1973 before entering private practice in Mobile, and he became an Assistant US Attorney in the Southern District of Alabama in 1975. In 1981, President Ronald Reagan nominated Sessions to become the new District Attorney, and he was nominated to the district court in 1986. However, he was accused of racism for calling the NAACP and ACLU communist-inspired and un-American, claiming that they forced civil rights down the throats of people. He also joked about thinking that the Ku Klux Klan was "okay" until they "smoked pot", and he called the African-American Assistant Attorney Thomas Figures "boy" and told him to be be careful how he behaved in front of white people. Sessions responded by saying that his statements were either jokes or were taken out of context, and he said that the NAACP and ACLU harbored "un-American" feelings. His nomination to the District Court was withdrawn after a 10-8 vote against him, with two US Republican Party members votng against him due to his racist views.

Entry into politics
In November 1994, Sessions became the Attorney-General of Alabama, and he defeated Alabama state senator Roger Bedford, Jr. to become a member of the Senate in 1996. He would later become the first Republican senator in Alabama to be reelected since the Reconstruction era, and he was also one of two Republican senators representing the state together; this was another first since Reconstruction. In 2015, Sessions endorsed Donald Trump for the US presidency, agreeing with his xenophobic anti-immigration policies and his proposed ban on Muslim immigration. On 18 November 2016, Trump announced that he was going to nominate Sessions as Attorney-General of the United States after he was elected President, meeting criticism from the press.